Various Artists - The Hitmakers Sing Neil Young (2016)

Neil Young had been recording music since 1963, when he had his first local hit single with 'The Sultan' by his band The Squires, through the late 60's with Buffalo Springfield', and then when he started his solo career in 1969. However, it could arguably be said that it wasn't until 1970's 'After The Goldrush' that he came up with a set of songs which could be said to stand the test of time as classics. The songs on that album have become some of his best-known works, and because of that have attracted numerous other artists attempts to give us their own take on them. Most of these artists recognised the quality of the songs straight away, and so the majority of the better covers come from 1970 and 1971, although it was worth the wait to hear Died Pretty's take on 'When You Dance'. Prelude even garnered a hit single with their a cappella version of the title track, and Francois Hardy's Gallic rendering of 'When The Morning Comes' just makes you wish that Young had written some verses to go with it, while Danish garage rockers The Teenmakers decided to add their take on 'Southern Man' to the flip a 1970 single. There's not much more that I can say about these songs, so I'll let the music do the talking, and as 'Oh Lonesome Me' from the album was itself a cover, I've added a couple of extra songs from his CSN&Y phase from the same period to make up the time.    

 

  
Track listing

01 Tell Me Why (Matthews Southern Comfort 1970)  
02 After The Goldrush (Prelude 1973)  
03 Only Love Can Break Your Heart (Jackie DeShannon 1972)  
04 Southern Man (The Teenmakers 1970)  
05 Till The Morning Comes (Francois Hardy 1972)  
06 Don't Let It Bring You Down (Hookfoot 1971)
07 Birds (Linda Ronstadt 1972) 
08 When You Dance I Can Really Love (Died Pretty 1988)
09 I Believe In You (Rita Coolidge 1971) 
10 Cripple Creek Ferry (Anonymous Choir 2016)
11 Helpless (Buffy Sainte-Marie 1971)
12 Everybody I Love You (Morningstar 1979)
13 Ohio (The Isley Brothers 1971)

Neil Young & Crazy Horse - Toast (2001)

Sometime in late 2000 or early 2001, Neil Young went into the studio with Crazy Horse and cut an album that was to be named 'Toast', after the studio where it was recorded. The only song to see the light of day from these sessions was 'Goin’ Home', which appeared on the underwhelming 'Are You Passionate?', but for years Young has claimed that 'Toast' is on the verge of being officially released, and he was enthusiastic about it in a Rolling Stone interview in in 2008, saying "It's an amazing listening experience. It was recorded in 5.1. It’s a mind-blowing record, and I don’t think it's a commercial record, but it's great rock & roll, very moody, kind of jazzy. It was recorded in the same place where Coltrane was recorded, so there's a lot of heavy stuff in there". He expanded on the songs, saying "The music of 'Toast' is about a relationship. There is a time in many relationships that go bad, a time long before the break up, where it dawns on one of the people, maybe both, that it’s over. This was that time. The sound is murky and dark, but not in a bad way, and from the first note, you can feel the sadness that permeates the recording. That song, with its refrain, "Don't say you love me", is called 'Quit', while the next one 'Standing In The Light' is sort of like a Deep Purple hit. 'Goin' Home' follows, painting a landscape where time doesn't matter - because everything is going south. A lady is lost in her car. The dark city surrounds her - past, present and future. Then the scene changes to a religious guy who just lost his job as a logger - he can't cut any more tress and so he's turning on Jesus, and then the album closes with 'Gateway Of Love', beckoning with "background noise on a changing sky". I had forgotten about these songs, put them out of my mind and went on living my life". However, like many of Young's unreleased albums it currently remains locked away, so we'll have to find another way to hear it. Although 'Toast' was never released, it seems that Young really was intending it to appear, as he played all the songs from it on his 2001 world tour, and many of these concerts were recorded. While 'Quit' did eventually appear on 'Are You Passionate' alongside 'Goin' Home', this was a re-recorded version with Booker T. & The M.G.s, so I've taken a recording with Crazy Horse from a Montreux gig, and added the other four tracks from his Japanese concert at the Fuji Rock Festival, so that we can hear an approximation of what the album might have sounded like. As it is quite short at just 33 minutes, I've added a cover that Young has performed a few times with Crazy Horse but which never seems to have made it to an official live album, rounding it out to a more acceptable 44 minutes. 

Track listing 

01 Quit
02 Standing In The Light Of Love
03 Goin' Home
04 Hold You In My Arms
05 Gateway Of Love
06 All Along The Watchtower

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - Everybody's Alone (1969)

For a complete lowdown on unissued Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young songs then head over to Paul's site for CSN and CSNY, but I wanted to post this album as I've had this bootleg CD for many years and it's probably the unofficial album that I play the most. Crosby, Stills & Nash's first self-titled album was released in May 1969 and was an immediate hit, spawning two Top 40 hit singles and receiving key airplay on the new FM radio format. With the exception of drummer Dallas Taylor, Stills had handled the lion's share of the instrumental parts himself, and although it was a testament to his talent, it left the band in need of additional personnel to be able to tour, now a necessity given the debut album’s commercial success. Retaining Taylor, the band decided initially to hire a keyboard player, and Stills at one point approached Steve Winwood, who declined. Atlantic label head Ahmet Ertegün suggested Canadian singer/songwriter Neil Young as a fairly obvious choice, and despite initial reservations by Stills and Nash (Stills owing to his history with Young in Buffalo Springfield, and Nash due to his personal unfamiliarity with Young) the trio eventually expanded to a quartet with Young a full partner. With Young on board, the restructured group went on tour in the late summer of 1969 through the following January. Between tour dates the band convened at Wally Heider's Studio between June and November 1969, and laid down some tracks for a proposed second album, although as it turned out most of the songs remained unreleased until the box sets started to appear. The recordings are all in superb quality, and highlights include beautiful alternate recordings of 'Triad' and 'The Lee Shore', a gorgeous in-studio take of 'Blackbird', and a lovely rendition of the Fred Neil track 'Everybody’s Talkin’', which Harry Nilsson made popular on the 'Midnight Cowboy' soundtrack. I've made a few edits to some of the songs and trimmed the track listing, but I've kept the basic layout of the cover, and just upgraded it by replacing the black and white photos with colour ones. I've also re-titled it, as 'Studio Archives 1969' was a bit bland. Paul has spread these songs over a number of his albums, so you could treat this as a sampler, and if you like what you hear then there's loads more out there for you to enjoy. 

Track listing

01 How Have You Been (John Sebastian cover) Recording Date Unknown 
02 Everyday We Live (Stephen Stills) Recorded at Wally Heider's Studio 1969 
03 Everybody's Talkin' (Fred Neil cover) Recording Date Unknown 
04 Sea Of Madness (Studio Take) Recorded at Wally Heider's Studio 1969 
05 Triad (Acoustic Studio Take) Recording Date Unknown
06 The Lee Shore (Different vocal take) Recorded at Stephen Stills' Home Studio 1969 
07 I'll Be There (Stephen Stills) Recorded at Wally Heider's Studio 1969 
08 Blackbird (Beatles cover) Recorded at Wally Heider's Studio 1969 
09 Ivory Tower (Stephen Stills) Recorded at Wally Heider's Studio 1969 
10 Everybody's Alone (Neil Young) Recorded at Wally Heider's Studio 1969. 
11 You're Wrong Baby (Graham Nash) Recorded at Wally Heider's Studio 1969
12 30 Dollar Fine (Stephen Stills) Recorded at Wally Heider's Studio 1969

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - Ohio (1970)

On May 4th, 1970, the Ohio National Guard open fire on college students at Kent State University who were protesting the slaughter of innocent Cambodian civilians by the US military industrial complex. Neil Young wrote a song about it and CSNY rush released it as a single at the end of the month, with 'Find the Cost Of Freedom' as the b-side, and it turned out to be the last CSNY studio recording for 18 years. Despite being banned from many radio stations, it soon became the anthem to the protest movement, so here we'll expand the non-album single into a full-length LP using their solo albums recorded that year, with each track having to include at least two of the members. This is my third revision of the album, and this time I decided to add 'Southern Man' from Neil's solo album 'After the Gold Rush', as it was a regular part of CSNY's set list and includes Stills on background vocals. I removed Stills' 'We Are Not Helpless' which now seems a bit over the top on this otherwise rather somber and serious album, which was recorded during a year of political turmoil, personal heartbreak and Richard Nixon.
Side one opens with the promiscuity anthem 'Love the One You're With', recorded in London by Stills who then added Crosby and Nash's background vocals later on back home. Nash's heartbreaking 'Simple Man' is about his breakup with Joni Mitchell, providing a stark contrast to the upbeat opening number, and taking us deeper into the emotional caverns of the album. 'What Are Their Names?' comes next, providing a rather ominous segue into the title track featuring all four members, followed by the b-side that had actually been played at Woodstock the previous August, but not recorded until May of 1970. That would make a good end to an album side right there, but we'll fill up the remaining space with another heartbreaking Nash song featuring Jerry Garcia on pedal steel guitar and a gospel-infused Stills number.
Side two begins with 'Music is Love' with both Crosby and Young on vocals, followed by Crosby, Young and most of The Grateful Dead on 'Cowboy Movie'. and the album ends with 'Southern Man', which most likely contains Stills on background vocals, and fits nicely into the overall theme of domestic turmoil, both at the national and personal level. The cover is based on the US 'Ohio' single picture sleeve.

Track listing

01 Love the One You're With

02 Simple Man 

03 What Are Their Names

04 Ohio

05 Find the Cost of Freedom

06 I Used to Be a King

07 Sit Yourself Down 

08 Music is Love 

09 Cowboy Movie

10 Southern Man 

From The Album Fixer October 2016. All notes and opinions are his.

Neil Young - Buffalo Alone (1967) Upgrade

On a recent holiday I took a few of my reconstructions to listen to, and on hearing this one some years after I put it together, I felt that a couple of things prevented it from working as well as it could. The main one was the inclusion of the song 'Broken Arrow', which, while it is undoubtedly one of Young's finest pieces, includes parts from two other tracks which are also on the album, and so I felt that it probably wouldn't have been included if he was going to have the studio version of 'Mr Soul' on there, as well as 'Down Down Down', which uses the main melody of 'Broken Arrow'. I've also removed the closing 'I'm Your Kind Of Guy' as it was rather short, as Young admitted at the end of the recording, and didn't really fit with the reflective mood of most of the other songs, and I've rejigged the running order slightly. This leaves us with a concise 36 minute album, which still includes 13 tracks, and is closer to the length of the average record of the period, making what I feel that Young's debut could have sounded like in 1967. 

Track listing

01 Slowly Burning 
02 Expecting To Fly
03 Old Laughing Lady
04 I Am a Child 
05 One More Sign
06 Sugar Mountain 
07 Mr. Soul
08 Down, Down, Down
09 Sell Out 
10 Round and Round and Round
11 Flying on the Ground is Wrong
12 Falcon Lake
13 Down To The Wire

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - War Songs (1972)

With the sad demise of Album Fixer's site we've lost a massive library of great imagined and reconstructed albums. He always put a lot of work into the concepts and sequencing of his posts, and although he didn't include links to the albums, part of the fun was tracking down the songs and compiling them yourself. In doing this I've always found the Russian site http://musicmp3spb.org invaluable, as it has a database of literally millions of albums, and they are split out into album tracks, so that you can download a song at a time if that's all you need. It's great not to have to download a whole album just to get one song, and so this one was relatively easy to put together.
The story behind the album is that in May 1972 Neil Young called up Graham Nash and asked him to come over and sing on a new song he'd written called 'War Song', which was written to support George McGovern's anti-Vietnam War presidential campaign. It didn't help as McGovern lost in a landslide defeat, but the premise was - what if Young and Nash had called in Crosby and Stills to record some more protest/political songs for an album named after the single.
CSNY have always had a lot to say for themselves, so it's not beyond the realms of possibility that this could have happened, and this is what it could have sounded like.

 Track listing

01 Immigration Man 
02 Johnny's Garden 
03 War Song 
04 Games 
05 Military Madness 
06 Where Will I Be?
07 Change Partners 
08 Chicago/We Can Change The World 
09 Page 43 
10 Stranger's Room 
11 Soldier
12 Sugar Babe
13 Southbound Train 

In memory of Album Fixer I might post a few more of his reconstructions later, with links to my attempts to compile them. Bob Dylan's 'Down In The Flood' was one of his better efforts, and also one of mine in doing the cover, so I might do that one next.

Neil Young - Buffalo Alone (1967)

In June 1967 Neil Young walked out on Buffalo Springfield on the eve of an important TV appearance on the Tonight Show. He was unhappy that the band wouldn't let him sing on his own songs, and wanted to do his own thing. A few months later he rejoined the band, but what if he hadn't, and had decided that now was the time to branch out on his own. The songs that he had written which later turned up on the next Buffalo Springfield album might have been featured on his first solo album, and this is what it could have sounded like.

Track listing

01 Slowly Burning 
02 Broken Arrow
03 Old Laughing Lady
04 I Am a Child 
05 Expecting to Fly
06 One More Sign
07 Sugar Mountain 
08 Mr. Soul
09 Down, Down, Down
10 Sell Out 
11 Round and Round and Round
12 Down to the Wire
13 Flying on the Ground is Wrong
14 Falcon Lake
15 I'm Your Kind of Guy

Neil Young - Homegrown (1975)

This is one of those albums that everyone knows about but no-one has ever heard, as Young has kept these songs firmly under wraps, just teasing us every so often by telling us that he is going to release it as part of his 'Archives' series  Different track listing abound, and this is an amalgamation of those that I thought looked most likely to have been considered. I've managed to find all the tracks bar two, mostly studio versions, but where they don't exist I've used live tracks from the correct period, and I've tried to edit them so that they don't sound live, by cutting out audience noise at the beginning, and fading at the end if it didn't sound too contrived. Apparently cover art was drawn up, although I've only found this on Wikipedia, so I'm not sure if it is genuine or not, but I like it anyway.

Track listing

01 Star Of Bethlehem
02 Try
03 Homefires
04 Little Wing
05 The Old Homestead
06 Pardon My Heart
07 Homegrown
08 Give Me Strength
09 Love Art Blues
10 White Line
11 Kansas
12 Separate Ways